A Game Can Be Great Even When You Lose

I decided to share with you my story on a Dead of Winter game that I recently played and proved to be perhaps the most intriguing story of those I have played in this zombie game!

We were a group of 4 players and instead of playing cooperatively, we decided to add a traitor in the game. So, we added a betrayal secret objective card to the non-betrayal cards and guess what! I was to be the traitor and I instantly knew that I was going to make the most of it!

The truth is that I had to fulfil many objectives in order to win the game. I was supposed to win if morale was at 0, if I controlled only one survivor (not that hard to achieve), if I had at least one weapon card and finally if I had at least one food card, one fuel card, one medicine card and one junk card (and not the starter items included!). So, I knew that I had to do many things along with trying to hide my identity and make the others trust me.

I must admit that I did really well in the latter and my poker face was of great success! I was quite convincing when saying that I didn’t have many food tokens to provide for the colony, but the truth is that my hand was full of them! However, in order to avoid any of the other players getting suspicious of me, I took actions that would be to the team’s benefit. At the same time, I had placed my survivors in different locations searching for those items my objective card required but I wasn’t really lucky with that, since I could not find a single weapon throughout the whole game! So frustrating! Moreover, I didn’t seem to have a very good chance of making morale drop in any way and what is more, doing so without revealing my identity. For this reason, as the game progressed I ended up enjoying the traitor’s role, while the other players at some point were really messed up, trying to figure out whether I was to be trusted or not!

The greatest part is that as the game was coming to its end and it seemed that my opponents were heading to victory, things changed quite dramatically for them in the last two rounds and the moment that the game was about to end, morale dropped to zero! So, I may have failed to achieve my own objectives, but at least I was glad to see the others lose at the last minute! And of course, I couldn’t help laughing out loud when I revealed my identity and saw their reaction. I must say that I had messed with their minds pretty well and that was the most fun part for me throughout the whole game!

Ireth

I got to know the world of board games along with NinjaBoy several years ago. So we both ended up getting hooked on playing, until we finally decided to create this website, so that boardgamers from all over the world will gather around.
I am a translator and a copywriter. Making this site, as well as working on it every single day, has been a great experience and we are happy to know that it has brought together people who share the same love for board games. So, choose your character, shuffle your deck and roll your dice, for there are some board game stories here to explore!